Hello everyone and welcome to the Making Of Drilling Core. In this walkthrough I'm going to talk about the key things that made up not only this image, but give an insight into how I make most digital speed paintings. We'll start off with the sketching phase, choosing the appropriate color palette, maximizing brush texture and finally using textures to finish the scene.

Setup

I get a lot of questions about how I start my paintings. While it's a simple question, it has a fairly complicated answer. For me, a painting shapes itself around random fields of color that appear on my screen. The only thing I know for sure are the colors and the mood the colors can give. I start off by making a color palette, or picking one from my library. I have various sets of color palettes that I've made and expanded on over the years. A very quick and easy way to get a nice color palette from a reference image (photographs are great for this) is to load the image in Photoshop, go to Image > Mode > Index Color and then in this popup window select the amount of colors you want (try to keep it low, somewhere between 16 and 32 should do nicely). This will heavily modify the plate, but that's OK. Next go to Image > Mode > Color Table and voila (Fig.01). Save out the swatches and you're on your way. Make sure you tweak your palette to truly make it your own. What I frequently do is make an image with one of my old palettes, color balance it and create a new palette. Just to keep things fresh.

Fig. 01

The Basics

Since these paintings always happen fairly quickly it's good to keep in mind why these images can be made so fast. One major aspect of it is the ability to see tons of different things in what are essentially just blobs of color (Fig.02). Having a broad library in your mind of how compositions work and how cameras can be positioned around the subject matter helps a lot. It pushes things out of just side views (even though this one is) and challenges you to also use more extreme angles, so really these blobs of color can become anything you want from any angle! The trick is to start to learn how to see them. Don't worry if the first few tries don't work out as you want them to. Take your time, be patient and remember that it's a learning process. Repetition is key!

Fig. 02

The next thing is to familiarize yourself with the shapes you will be using. Drilling Core was the second out of a series of three paintings so I had already had made one painting which helped me grasp the mood and the shapes I would be using (Fig.03). Each shape lends itself to a particular rendering technique; even when going for a really rough and painterly shape there are a few things to keep in mind about surface quality. Shiny, hard surfaces should generally not be painted with rough brushes because their surface qualities are smoother. The way light bounces off things can help sell realism. Now this is, of course, just a suggestion. The more you understand how surfaces work the more you can bend the rules.

Fig. 03

Tips and Tricks

1. Make sure you know where your light comes from and only apply highlights in the right places, but don't go overboard! A nice soft lighting in contrast with just a few super bright highlights can go a long way.

2. The Polygonal Lasso tool is very much your friend. Create super crisp edges with it to really make surfaces pop.

3. Histogram. Learn it well; it will help you a lot to balance the overall painting. I personally use the Levels layer a lot to keep my painting in check and to make sure I have a nice color distribution.

4. Iterate, also with colors. Don't be shy or reluctant to paint the same bit over and over again until it fits the scene. The same goes for colors. I use tons and tons of Color Balance layers with various masks to really get the colors I want, mixing in complementary colors in the shadows.

5. Detail Aspect Ratio - a word I use to describe high detail vs low detail areas. This draws the eye in and also ensures you don't have to detail every last bit of the painting. In my opinion this is what gives a piece it's flavor. The artist's touch, if you will.

6. Textures. There are tons of different stock texture libraries on the web, and also a lot of really good DVDs you can buy that provide you with textures you can use to really liven up your scene. You can choose to paint surfaces, but I like to throw in quick metal or pipe textures and put them on a blending layer to get that sense of realism across.

On with the Painting

Now on with my scene (Fig.04). A few hours in and I had the basics done and a few textures applied. I still needed to work out some details, but the painting was pretty much set. Very early on I already had an idea what I wanted the blobs of color to be so the rest became a matter of filling in the gaps. These are the brushes that helped me do it (Fig.05).